"It's
for you," Conceptual Art and the Telephone
February
24 - March 25, 2011
In the Burt Chernow Galleries
(CLOSED March 19th and 20th)
RECEPTION:
Thursday, March 3 from 5 - 8 p.m.
This exhibition is supported in part
by the Connecticut
Commission on Culture and Tourism, which receives
support from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the
Werth Famiy Foundation, and Bob Schneider of Jimmy's
Apparel.
Artists
Include: John Cage, T Foley, Lukas Geronimas, Peter
Greenaway, Jonn Herschend, Jeremy LeClair, Christian
Marclay, Adam McEwen, Max Neuhaus, Yoko Ono, Robert
Peters, Pietro Pellini, Rachel Perry Welty, and Hannah
Wilke.
Inspired by the Housatonic
Museum of Art’s (HMA)
most immediate audience, our students at Housatonic Community
College, the HMA has curated “It’s for
you,” Conceptual Art and the Telephone. The
exhibition is, in part, a response to the wide-ranging
use of phones in the hallways and other areas on campus. Each
day students text, talk, surf the net, and listen to
music on their phones. With this exhibition, artworks
that use the phone as an artistic medium or mediator
are brought together in an original exhibition curated
by Terri C. Smith.
The projects range from the late 1960s to today and
include sound pieces, videos, and objects that resonate
with the functions, technologies, and physicality of
the telephone. Artists in the exhibition include: T.
Foley, Lukas Geronimas, Jeremy LeClair, Christian Marclay,
Yoko Ono, Rachel Perry Welty, Robert Peters, Pietro Pellini,
and Hannah Wilke.
Many of the artists in “It’s
for you” aim
to democratize the artist/audience relationship, a quality
that is intricately woven into the history of conceptual
art. In “It’s for you” Yoko
Ono might call the gallery as part of her Telephone
Piece, providing direct contact between artist and “viewer.” Students
will work with T Foley, creating their own ring tones
as part of her Locally Toned project. Archival
materials are also included as a way to represent ephemeral
works from the past as with Robert Peters’ Naming
Others: Manufacturing Yourself (1993) where the
artist asked people to call an 800 number from pay phones
and choose which stereotyping phrase described them best.
“It’s for
You” harnesses
the familiarity of the telephone as a way of introducing
audiences to a variety of conceptual art practices, which
often include a mix of art theory and social critique.
The exhibition, consequently, endeavors to connect concerns
found in contemporary art with the objects, communication
habits, and changing technologies in our daily lives. In
that spirit, visitors and students will be encouraged
to comment on the exhibition using telephone-friendly
interfaces such as Twitter.
